AG Edwards philosophy going going ...... gone

Wachovia bought A.G. Edwards almost a year ago. I think the effects of the acquisition are starting to be felt. When the acquisition was announced, I had my own personal reservations. One of the main reasons that I selected A.G. Edwards was that they were independent and did not manage their own mutual funds. I consider managing mutual funds and giving financial advice to be one of the greatest conflicts of interest that exist in the financial advising industry. Which mutual fund products will be the first recommended by any of the brokers? The mutual funds that their company manages will be offered first, of course. Here is a link that summarizes up the philosophy that AG Edwards had. It’s an excerpt from a the book: The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value Google only displays the image of the pages, but these pages on AG Edwards summarize my beliefs on what a financial advisor should do as well.

So in less than a year my broker has left. That in itself is no big deal. He was OK but I wouldn’t move my money because he left. 3 months after my broker has left I finally get a phone call from the “new” guy handling my account. Why? Not to touch base with me to get to know me, my goals, etc… No, because one of the stocks I own was getting bought out in an all cash deal, and they wanted to know if I intended to tender my shares. “Duh” I think this is a computer alert, and I’m being contacted by an employee to take action. No mention that since this was his first time to talk to me, would I like to schedule time to go over account, goals, etc…. nothing. I’ve had the chance to talk to him several times now, due to mistakes, mis-handlings of the account. They didn’t tender the shares; they (AG Edwards) changed the address from my current address to a former address. With every phone call not one single mention of going over the Account, or any other pleasantries. So, what do I do? I get the feeling that this new guy just got his series 7, doesn’t have an investment philosophy, and will most likely start pawning Wachovia funds to me. I think it is time to take my money someplace else, because AG Edwards is close to not existing anymore, at least the AG Edwards that drew me to use them.

It's like reading 1984

If you ever wondered what inspired George Orwell to write 1984, just look to England's Parliament, and court system. This Article is how the former Lord Chancellor want to make retroactive changes to the Web.

I think it would be easier to make changes to the law instead. Once information is public it is public. If you are so concerned about contaminating the jury pool, have a better selection process, and once selected, sequester them.

Patents like this should not be allowed

It's because of companies like this that these kind of patents should not be allowed. To me this is the equivalent of patenting skipping a special form of walking.

This world is filled with people who have great ideas that never get fulfilled by the person who thought them. If you don't share the idea, and never implement that idea, you should NOT be able to get any kind of monetary benefits from some one else who also thought up the idea independently and actually implemented the idea and made money.

Ruby: How to Parse an HTML page and retrieve embedded table information

I couldn’t find readily available an HTML::TABLE parser for ruby like I had for Perl. So I thought I’d just try and make basic one for a page that I like to grab information from. I really couldn’t find any good examples posted. So here is a sample method for extracting information from a table on an HTML page.

First I usually start with a very simple get the data and print the data out. The main purpose is to verify that you actually retrieving the data.

require 'net/http'

url = 'http://your.url.here/

url_data = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url)).body

p url_data

Second you can look at the output data to see how the table labels are made.

Next I add the next piece to split the sheet data along the different embedded tables. This will become a loop process to access the different tables. Right now I just want to print out all of the tables.

data = url_data.split(/

data.each do |x|

p x

end

The first table split lines is 24 tables down. In this case I’m finding an embedded table within the original table or Table 24 for this page and it has a different tag format a "forward slash"table. The page I’m looking at is very table extensive in its layout. I reset a counter before going into the do each on the split of the table lines. Once I hit the table that I want to drill down further into I start another loop. At this stage I’m printing out the entire row of the table that is being displayed.

y=0

data.each do |x|

y = y+1

if y == 24

data_table = x.split(/<\/table>/)

z = 0

data_table.each do |t2|

if z == 0

data_row = t2.split(/tr/)

data_row.each do |row|

p row

end

end

end

end

end

The next step would be to isolate the individual elements in the row that you want to extract. In my case my elements are laid out in a single column. Column 1 is padded space, column 2 are labels and column 3 are the data values. So to display only the column 3 values I would loop through like this.

data.each do |x|

y = y+1

if y == 24

data_table = x.split(/<\/table>/)

z = 0

data_table.each do |t2|

if z == 0

data_row = t2.split(/tr/)

data_row.each do |row|

data_column = row.split(/

c = 0 data_column.each do |column| c= c +1 if c == 3 p column end end end end end end end After this point it’s clean up of the extra HTML formatting tags. Save the values to a local variable and work with the data.

I cut and pasted Scott Jennings Article last night thinking that I might repost it here just to preserve a drama that I found quite funny and interesting. It seems several others have had the same idea as well. Nerfbat and Ironrealms have done repostings as well.

Deep down inside almost every WoW player or other MMO player would really like to play their favorite game for free. So, if you could sell a few items for real world cash to cover your monthly gaming expenses. Why not. The people in the Article have gone way beyond this, they are just exploiting the game economy in a way most likely unintended by the developers. If the game developers had intended this to happen they would have also developed a market place for these goods to be trade and sold.

Any way it is quite fun to see a rock fight being done in a house of glass. Lots of broken windows.

___________________________________________________________________

Scott Jennings says:

MMOcitizen.com, a website operated by the law firm currently bringing a class action lawsuit against IGE, obtained and published a copy of a complaint in another lawsuit involving IGE: this one brought against former CEO Brock Pierce last year by co-founder Alan Debonneville.

For almost 5 years, Debonneville has dedicated his entire life to the creation, development, and success of IGE US, LLC (”IGE”). IGE’s meteoric rise from an under funded startup to the market leader culminated in a Goldman-Sachs investment of $60,000,000, which set the value of IGE at the time of $220,000,000. While Pierce, a flamboyant former child actor, has always been the public face of IGE, Debonneville has been the tireless working founder, responsible for the expansion and operation of the company.

The filing goes into great detail about IGE’s rise and fall from Debonneville’s point of view, with, just in case you weren’t already glued to your PDF files, added dirt from the dot-com-money-and-man-boy-love days of DEN.

After living and working in Spain for a few months, Debonneville observed that Rector and Pierce had a very close relationship, one that did not seem normal between a 40-year old man and a 20-year old young man…

…Apparently, there were a multitude of charges related to the prior operation of a company specifying that Pierce, Rector, and Shackley had stolen money from the company and wasted corporate assets for things like the purchase of illicit drugs, living a lavish lifestyle, and criminal allegations of transporting a minor across state lines for sexual purposes. Upon learning this information, Debonneville questioned Pierce regarding the allegations, and Pierce stated that the claims were false and contrived as a setup by some competitors and former employees…

Wild enough? It gets… something. Worse? Better? Uwe Boll?

Debonneville was told by Pierce that the “Spanish FBI” came to their house with a “SWAT” team in helicopters, kicked in their door, shot their dog, and threw all of them in jail.

The complaint eventually leaves the Mallorca Vice portion of history and gives a breezy history of much of what we knew already - IGE’s quick rise and huge cash infusions, and the use of that in a quest to purchase respectability through hiring executives and purchasing websites. Eventually, it all falls apart around the time of the Goldman Sachs investment as the principals began to fall out over arguing over how to divide up the huge amount of stock, which is dealt in the document (from Debonneville’s viewpoint, of course) in point-by-point detail.

Debonneville was starting to discover that Pierce had not only lied to Debonneville about the Yantis Stock Repurchase, but also that Pierce had benefited personally to the detriment of Debonneville from the Salyer and Maslow sale of stock. Of course, Debonneville was shocked to learn that Pierce had sold any of Pierce’s stock in IGE…

…On July 14, 2006, in an apparent attempt to convince Debonneville that his interest in IGE was becoming worth less and less money, Debonneville was sent an article regarding a crackdown on the sale and purchase of game items for cash in Korea. The implication was that IGE’s recent acquisition of Itemmania, a Korean online house, was going to be a failure. In hindsight, it appears that this was just another one of Pierce’s attempts to manipulate Debonneville into selling his stock to Pierce for a less than fair value, certainly for less than Pierce realized on the sale to Maverick. Today, it is likely that this may in fact be IGE’s most valuable remaining asset…

And just in case you started nodding off with tales of stock screwballery… enter everyone’s friend in space, Jonathan Yantis.

Yantis also advised Debonneville that if a deal was not reached with IGE, Yantis had already put a network in place to compete with and destroy IGE. Yantis stated that through the hiring of certain individuals who he had a long time business relationship with, Yantis would sell currency that had been exploited or duped.

Exploiting or duping is a process whereby an outsider hacks the game program into creating currency for the individual or duplicating an item and then selling it over and over which also results the creation of currency. These actions allow for the exploiter/duper to create an endless supply of currency without any real cost to that currenct. This is something Yantis has done in the past and made large profits from. The exploiter/duper would typically receive a commission for any currency sold of about 40% of the sales price. Due to the currency being exploited, Yantis was and would be able to sell currency at a price significantly below market, since the cost of the currency sold was non existent. This also allowed for an infinite supply to be created in what could take as little time as a few minutes.

Yantis indicated that this was also how he could turn the trading arm of IGE around and make it profitable, almost instantly. Pierce was aware of Yantis’ intent to use these exploits. In fact, Pierce counted on them as part of the rationale behind why Yantis should be brought back to work for IGE.

A clearer explanation of the toxic effects of RMT on online gaming has yet to be written. (I know. I tried.)

I’m sure that as this hits the commentariat there will be more to be said. Oh, there will be more.

Ruby Project

The past few weeks I've been working with ruby creating a few small short projects. I've been impressed with what I've been able to do with little effort. Almost everything I've tried has taken little time, and has been fairly easy to debug and get working well enough for me to use.

This is a short list of what I've been doing over the past few weeks.
Image file replacement program with GUI interface
XML feeds from a web site to populate a database with values
Retrieve a list of paid checks from Oracle ERP and place them into an excel spreadsheet
Send an e-mail with attachments (file mentioned above)

most of these were work related, some were just to test, while others turned into great time savings.

I'll post some details on some of the programs that I've written. The only dissappointment I have with ruby at the moment is the lack creating a compiled program. I want to distribute one program so that I don't have to actually run it anymore. Oh well.

Interactive Visual of the Stock Market

I found this link today, an interactive breakdown of the stock market. It breaks down the stock market by the major sectors, and then gives each company a different size square according to their market share within that sector. There are several options to see performance based on certain points in time. Look at the financial sector for the past 26 weeks almost all red.

http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/

W. Virginia, other states too

I saw this article today and wasn't really surprised by it. I haven't had to business with the state of W. Virginia, but I have had to deal with states like Mississippi, and Alabama. These states are consistently ranked at the bottom of almost every category. I think the only category where they rank high is on how hard they are to deal with.

Single Source of Truth

One of the more common issues for businesses today is reporting on business activity. Reporting issues and the reasons for these issues are endless. If you are in business, you most likely have reporting issues.

Why do companies need reporting? To help the people in charge of running the company, run the company as efficiently and as effectively has possible. Every decision that is made has an effect on the bottom line. Decisions have a better chance of having a positive affect to the bottom line when the business has more accurate information about its activity.

Growth through acquisitions creates a lot of challenges. When one company acquires another, a lot of duplication is introduced. Not all duplication can be eliminated immediately, and some duplication may exist for years beyond the original acquisition date. This holds true especially with the IT solutions that handle, track, record, and report business activity.

Most of the IT solutions for each of the acquired companies are most likely different from the other companies’ solutions. These differences will range from systems that record business activity, to the nomenclature that each of the individual business use to describe their business activity.

Because of the differences between the acquired companies, multiple challenges exist when trying to report overall business activity.

Accurate reporting is essential for a company to be and remain successful. It is through reporting that informed decisions can be made.

The answer for this need for accurate reporting is something I call: The Single Source of Truth.

Security?

Found this article. Kinda sums up the whole meaning of what Apple and other companies really mean when they are talking security. Security is nor to protect you the user, it is to protect them the company whose software / product you are using.